Orson
Welles' Young Magician Friend: A Conversation With Jim Steinmeyer

By
Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005. His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

F
For Fake

During the
last four years of his life, one of Orson Welles' closest friends was
Jim Steinmeyer, who was at that time a young magician who had just arrived
in Los Angeles. Steinmeyer has since emerged as, in the words of one magazine
profile, "the best living originator of stage illusions," developing
and planning magic for talent as diverse as Doug Henning, David Copperfield,
and Harry Blackstone. In an interview in May 2003, Steinmeyer recalled
to me his
friendship with Welles, their creative collaboration, his involvement
with a few of the many Welles films which never came to fruition, and
the ways in which magic provides a meaningful context to view Welles'
cinema. --PT

Peter Tonguette: When did you first meet Orson Welles?

Jim Steinmeyer:
Well, let's see, I think I met him in '81. I came out to Los Angeles in
the early summer of '81 to work with Doug Henning, who was a magician
at that time who was working, and I was hired by him to work with him.
And a number of friends of mine out here were magicians who worked with
Welles as kind of consultants and helpers and assistants for his magic
projects. At that time he used to do, you know, he would regularly do
something on The Merv Griffin Show when he appeared or--I don't
think The Dean Martin Show was still running--but shows like that.
So he always had people that he worked with on that level, who helped
him with those projects. My friend Mike Caveney, who lives out here and
was a performing magician, and another friend, Don Keller, used to help
Orson kind of regularly on those. Don Wayne, also used to help him at
that time.

And so I knew
them and they used to talk about working with him. And Don Keller gave
him a book I had just written on magic that was an historical book about
stage magic and was published in Chicago before I came out here. Don said,
"Oh, I gave Orson Welles your book and he really loves it."
And I said, "Oh, that's great." "Well he's gonna call you."
And of course, I thought, "Yeah, mm-hmm." [Laughter] And at
that time, I was staying in some little--because I was out here for ostensibly
six months working with Doug--so I was staying at some little studio apartment
at the Oakwood, just over the hill from Hollywood. And one night, you
know, I come back and there's a message on my machine and it's Orson Welles!
And you think, this is completely unbelievable. So I went to meet him.

The first time
I met him, I went with Mike Caveney and they were shooting a little magic
segment I don't really know what for. I don't know if it was footage that
ended up... I have a memory that this footage was not stuff that ended
up in his magic special [The Magic Show (1976-1985; uncompleted)].
But, see, what he did was he shot all that stuff himself and then I think
several of those pieces--and I think this was one of them--was ostensibly
shot for some
television show, for a magic special that they were putting together,
and Orson always ended up with the footage. I think that some of [Welles]
magic special was done like this. And this was a thing in a really tiny
little studio in Hollywood that was of him literally taking a piece of
thread and breaking it into pieces and putting it back together.

PT: I've
seen that actually. The Munich Filmmuseum has most of his unfinished films
and have been assembling the raw footage and putting it together into
presentable forms. And I've seen that as part of an assembly of material
intended for The Magic Show. So it would have ended up in that,
apparently.

JS: Okay, that
makes sense. So anyway, I was there the night that they filmed that. And
it was a really, really, really tiny studio and he was--and since you've
just seen it--as I recall, part of it he was just smoking a cigar and
blowing smoke through it all. And it was a studio that was really kind
of like 15 X 15 feet and they were doing a little camera move in it too,
so they had track down. It was almost impossible to be anywhere. What
was funny was that what you ended up with--because of the camera move
and everything--was that staying out of the way meant you were kind of
laying on the ground, really close to him, kind of crouched down really
low to not be in his eye line. It took hours and hours and hours, because
it was all one long take and he did it again and again and again. Just
fantastic. And the presentation was fantastic and his voice was unbelievable.
And we all stunk like cigar smoke at the end as we left.

And he said,
"Oh, I'll call you and we'll have dinner sometime." And he did.
And I went down to his house and drove him to Ma Maison, which was weird,
because I was driving a little rented Mustang at the time--and he was
not self-conscious of that at all. And we went to Ma Maison.

So I knew him
between '81 and when he died in 85. When I was in L.A., we kind
of had dinner maybe once a week, certainly once every two weeks. And I
would certainly talk to him once or twice a week. What was slightly weird
was that I didn't really work with him that much. And for about three
of those Merv Griffin things, I was sort of pressed into service to put
them together for him. He talked to me about kind of other projects and
some of these were
pieces
that we were building, in a very leisurely way,
that he wanted for his magic special.

But, you know,
at the same time Mike Caveney was doing these, and Don Keller, and I didn't
really become one of those guys that he just sort of worked with. Occasionally,
like I say, he asked me to help with some of those, but mostly it was
kind of conversation about magic and other things, like politics. I remember
several evenings there, thinking, This is ridiculous that I'm here. [Laughter]
Think of who would want to be talking to him about his films. But, you
know, I also was aware that I guess that's part of the reason I was there.
Because he wanted to talk about other things. He wanted to talk about
magic and historical magic--he was really, really knowledgeable about
that. I probably don't need to say that. But as far as magicians go, he
really was amazing about his insights: the people he knew, the people
he'd seen, the stories he had. He talked to me about a magician named
Thurston, who he had seen as a boy, about what he was like. And David
Bamberg... he trained with David Bamberg and he was taught the floating
ball routine by his father.

So we talked
a lot about magic and we used to talk about certainly politics and kind
of what was happening in the day. And he certainly did talk about his
films, although I sort of didn't feel like what I wanted to do was be
the guy saying, "Tell me about the scene in Citizen Kane (1941)
where you did..." You know.

PT: Right,
he was probably pretty sick of that...

JS: Because
everyone in the world could do that and I kind of realized he didn't want
that, that wasn't of interest to him.

PT: So did
you two kind of hit it off immediately?

JS: I would
say so. He was really amazing and I also have to say he was really an
amazing friend. I remember him calling once and, you know, kind of saying,
"What's going on? What are you working on? How are you doing?"
And I said, "I'm fine." "Well, you don't sound fine. We
should get together."

And, you know,
he was fascinating on any subject. I mean, the stories were unbelievable.
He loved to go to Ma Maison. He said that the reason he always went there
was because they let him bring the dog and he used to go in the back entrance
with the dog...

PT: And
this was his black poodle?

JS: This was
his black poodle, Kiki, who was just nasty. [Laughter] I mean, it was
a sweet little dog, but it was one of those dogs that would bark when
you get up to leave. You know, it would go for your ankles when you leave!
But Kiki was great with him. He always kind of had Kiki in the crook of
his arm and then he would put her down on the chair next to him.

So he used
to go there, because he could bring the dog. A European thing. They have
fantastic food. They were really nice, obsequious to him. But there was
a point where going there was a little silly, I used to think. And I didn't
quite know what to do. Sometimes I would bring Chinese food. I think I
found a place in Glendale that had some stuff that he liked. And it was
just nicer because it was a little more low-key, you know, rather than
go into that place.

Then I went
to New York to do this show--Doug Henning was doing a show on Broadway.
And while we were planning it, Orson came through New York I think twice.
My memory is twice. But I used to talk to him on the phone and I saw him
when he came through New York a couple times and stayed at, I think, the
Carlyle. It was on the Upper East Side.

And then shortly
after that, I came back to Los Angeles and was working with Doug again
with other performers and I continued to see him now and then. I think
after that is sort of when he asked me to put together a couple of these
segments. And that's when we were also talking about segments for The
Magic Show. So that would have been '83, '84, into '85. And I did,
like I said, a couple of the Merv Griffin things. There were all sorts
of stories about how
he was difficult to work with. Kind of very goofy stories about his impatience
or what he wanted or how he asked something to be done. But I have to
say, I never experienced any of that. While I could imagine him being
that way, I never saw it. I also think, to a certain extent, you can see
that he's the kind of guy that a little of those stories go a long way.
And those are great stories to tell and exaggerate because he was so much
larger than life in so many ways.

But I did talk
to him about various things. We talked about shooting The Cradle Will
Rock in Italy (1). It was going to be done in an Italian film studio.
And that fell apart.

I talked to him quite a bit about The Cradle Will Rock, when he
was writing that script. I say I talked to him quite a bit--that was certainly
a topic of conversation. It wasn't like I was integral in that. I was
fortunate enough to hear all the stories. I did talk to him about the
magic sequence at the top of it and was kind of involved--again, just
involved conversationally, though he kind of bounced a bunch of stuff
off of me.

Years before,
we'd talked once about something--I think it was him that said, "Oh
this would make a great script." And we talked about it a little
bit, about kind of a turn of the century magician.

PT: I was
going to ask you about that. Jonathan Rosenbaum mentions that project
in his afterward to the published screenplay of The Cradle Will Rock ( Orson Welles. Santa Barbara: Santa Teresa Press, 1994)...

JS: Yeah, I
think he got that from me. I kind of forget what I had said to him.

Orson and I
talked about a story. I know what it was hinged on. I remember the elements,
the kind of truthful elements to it. It was kind of based on Harry Kellar,
who was an American magician who retired in 1908. And Kellar toured the
world a lot, working at a time when some of his audience thought it was
real magic and part of the audience didn't. Which was kind of the last
generation and the last opportunity to really be doing that in big cities,
in civilized countries, even if at times it was a third world.

And I know
that really interested Orson. He certainly had never seen Kellar, but
he knew about him. I think that was the element of it that sort of got
him excited, that whole element of this kind of exotic tour and being
right on the edge of it being real or not. And I remember there was a
great story that was from Walter Gibson. Walter Gibson was a writer who
did The Shadow and certainly Orson knew him. He didn't do the scripts,
he wrote the books and created the character, under the name of Maxwell
Grant. And Walter told me years ago about touring with Blackstone--this
would have been in the '40s--and watching the levitation illusion of Blackstone's.
He used to go in the basement, under the stage, and watch the machinery
work from below. And that's how he used to watch what was happening on
the stage--he would watch the machinery rising and falling underneath
and he knew how it all connected.

And I remember
Orson was really fascinated with that kind of thing, of this sort of disconnected
machinery working. I kind of remember that he was saying, "That's
a great scene because the great way to portray magic is to see some fantastic
apparatus and not necessarily know how it connects." In other words,
to see some wonderful piece of machinery and then see some fantastic effect
on stage. But then you don't necessarily know how ....

PT: ...how
it fits together.

JS: Right,
but you realize that there's a lot of work involved. I think that that's
sort of where that whole thing of watching the footsteps through the holes
in the stage came from that ended up at the beginning of Cradle Will
Rock. I mean, no one ever did that. You just wouldn't do that. That's
just preposterous and Orson knew that. But I think that was completely
his idea and that he quickly kind of fell in love with that, the whole
thing of watching the little holes and watching the lights go out in the
holes and everyone following.

And then fast
forward a year or so later, whenever he was writing Cradle Will Rock,
he was talking to me about it. And he told me a lot about that production
originally. He was very proud of it and it was really magical--it was
all based in stage illusion. And I know he thought that one of the problems
with it was that the magic didn't really look great. The real magic wouldn't
look great translated to film and so that he would need to goose it for
the film. And I think that was sort of why he applied that scene going
on onstage and the scene going on beneath the stage and all the men following
everything. And then it turned into his entrance in the film, how he comes
through the bag.

Again, it was completely his construction, but I remember that certain
elements ended up getting filtered through this story about a magician.

PT: To your knowledge, was there ever a script for this story about
a magician at the turn of the century?

JS: Absolutely not. I have to tell you, I'd be very surprised if--and
it's not impossible--but I'd be surprised if Orson ever sat down and wrote
an outline of it. We talked about things and he was certainly interested
in it, but it didn't seem to me like a thing he was really actively pursuing.

PT: I suppose because he had so many other projects going on...

JS: Yeah, at the time he was... I have to say, I think kind of the time
of that was around The Dreamers (1980-1982; uncompleted) (2).

PT: So that'd be between '80 and '82?

JS: It would have been after that.
It
was like '82, '83.

PT: I understand that The Magic Show was a project Welles shot
between 1976 and right up until his death. In unfinished form, it looks
like it would have been not only a presentation of his favorite magic
tricks--like the thread trick we discussed--but also interspersed with
some history and autobiography, as well as this long narrative segment
I've seen some of, about Abu Kahn.

JS: Well, I never saw the Abu Kahn material. That was shot before I moved
out to L.A. I know the guys that worked on it. Abb Dickson was around
with that. Don Keller was involved in that. Don Wayne was involved in
that. Some of the Abu Kahn segments seemed to me like they were first
shot for other projects, intended as chunks for other magic specials on
television. I know Orson really liked it. I don't really know when he
was assembling in his mind that this was kind of the Magic Show
project.

As you're probably
aware, when he died, the next day he was supposed to start shooting. He
had explained what else he wanted to shoot to put this together. And we
had outlined things and he was going to shoot at UCLA [the next day],
he had a theatre.

So he assembled
in his mind how that was going to go together, but I have a feeling that
that Abu Kahn narrative was kind of shot as short segments. And then over
the years, he'd sort of figured out how he wanted it assembled.

PT: Yes,
because he did work on it for so long.

JS: Yeah, absolutely.

PT: In the
chronology at the back of This Is Orson Welles (Orson Welles and
Peter Bogdanovich, HaperCollins, New York, 1992) there's an entry in 1976
which says something to the effect of, "Work begun on The Magic
Show"--or what became The Magic Show.

JS: Yeah, I
don't know if he had planned how the footage would finally be used. Some
of the segments might not have been intended for one project. He shot
magic that he liked, or intended the segments to be used in other television
specials.

I remember
one routine we worked on. I'll tell you what it was all hinged on. It
was that Alexander Graham Bell at the end of his life was working on a
machine to talk to the dead. And Orson thought that was just fantastic,
that kind of mix of technology and pseudo-science. And we talked about
a routine that was a spirit cabinet. A spirit cabinet is a really old
thing that in fact Kellar would have done. The tradition of it was that
it was a really old, wooden cabinet and ghosts would appear. And Orson
wanted to do one that was quite technological. He would get an older lady
up from the audience and then an image of her would actually appear in
this cabinet at a certain point. And I know he filmed it because I was
in New York at the time. I was quite surprised because one time I talked
to him, he said, "We're going to shoot the spirit cabinet at the
Variety Arts Theatre and we're going to do it next week." A friend
of mine, Don Bice, was involved, because Don told me all about it. So
I know it was shot, but I never saw anything about it... I kind of felt
Orson wasn't really happy with it. (3)

PT: I've definitely not seen that. The Munich Filmmuseum's assembly
has the thread trick, a piece called "Magic Mummy," some of
the Abu Kahn material, as well as a number of other things. But I gather
that for everything you see in the Munich assemblies, there is usually
a lot more where that comes from.

JS: Yeah, of
course. The only guy that knows about that--I say that because even Oja
[Kodar] was kind of in town and out of town during these things--is Gary
Graver, because he shot all of it. This [the spirit cabinet routine] would
have been kind of '82, end of '81, beginning of '82, I think when this
was shot.

I worked with
him on a couple of things that I guess were slated for The Magic Show.
One was an antique piece of apparatus, called the "card star."
And it was this kind of thing that looked like an antenna with five points
on it. He would throw a deck of cards at it and a card would stick to
each point of the star. And we had a really nice routine worked out for
that, for the card star--really wonderful handling of that. And then we
had built a spirit painting effect, which was really a beautiful effect
that hadn't been done since Vaudeville. I think it was kind of one of
the first things I worked on with him. It sort of came out of conversation.
We talked about some improvements and how to change it around a little
bit. So we had the apparatus made and he was really happy with it. And
I kind of thought, "Oh, this will be something he'll do on television."
Well, he said, "Oh, no, this is too good, this is too good. We're
not going to do this on Merv Griffin. This is too good for that show."

That was a piece that I know he wanted to do at UCLA. I remember Oja [Kodar]
gave me a little note that was sitting on his desk when he died that had
a list of things that he had written about the show. One of them had my
name on it, something about the table for the card star and "Jim's
reluctance about using it"--which I don't really remember what that
was, but anyway?

PT: Did
you know Oja Kodar well?

JS: I wouldn't
say I knew Oja Kodar well. She was in town and out of town--sometimes
she was out of the country. She wasn't a magic fan. She kind of said that,
she kind of joked about that. I really liked her. I thought she was really
smart and really perceptive. And just kind of as a person that was around,
I have to say I thought a lot of her. I thought she was really talented
and that she cared a lot about Orson.

My observation
is that they really loved each other.

PT: And,
you know, she worked on so many of his late projects...

JS: Absolutely.
I mean, it's astonishing.

But she had great stories and what was great was both of them together.
Several times--not very often--but several times I went there and he made
spaghetti a couple times. [Laughs] That was one of the few things he cooked.
And, I mean, it was really informal. But I remember a couple times having
dinner with him and her. And she had fantastic stories about both of them.
She was telling me about working with Jackie Gleason. She really had better
stories than Orson did about that whole experience. She was kind of the
lowly assistant who had to deal with it all. And, of course, Orson was
treated royally. But she had fantastic stories about what it was like
working with Gleason and the cast and the crew.

PT: Peter
Bogdanovich has talked about how disarming Welles was in person. We've
kind of talked about this a little already, but it took people off-guard
because they were expecting some kind of tyrant. Is that an impression
you'd share?

JS: Oh, I would
say so. Again, I've heard stories of working with him. You know, I've
certainly heard that tape of him doing those ridiculous British commercials,
you know, where he blows up. And so you know there's a guy there that's
capable of that. But, no, it was completely the opposite, and it was incredibly
disarming. I think that's absolutely right. He was really pleasant. He
really, really listened to people. He could talk intelligently about just
about anything.

I'll tell you
a story that's a really good example of this, of just how... I remember
going to dinner with him. It wasn't long before he died. Maybe a year
before he died. And something was bothering him. I mean, I remember thinking
that I could probably have gone back and figured out what it was. I don't
know if it was when the financing for Cradle Will Rock fell apart
or all the goofy stuff about selling the sled when Spielberg bought it.
(4) Something was bothering him. And I guess I was supposed to be--you
know, he wanted to go to dinner and he wanted a diversion and I guess
I was supposed to be it.

We were at
Ma Maison and I didn't know what I was supposed to say. I would mention
something and he would sort of dismiss it, in a slightly grumpy, in a
slightly depressed way. And I remember one of the things I said to him
was that I had just read Preston Sturges' first play, Strictly Dishonorable,
and what a really great play it was. And he kind of said, "Oh, yeah,
yeah, I saw that." That was what the whole conversation was like.
If you started something, he would dismiss it. And I knew that there was
something else on his mind, so
I was thinking, "Okay, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing
here."

Then there
was this long silence. Just as I'm starting to think, "Well, he didn't
see it, but he doesn't want to talk about it," he kind of looked
up and he said, Tulio Carmanate played the Latin lover in that."
And he said also, "Antoinette Perry was in it when I saw it, but
she didn't do it for a long time." And he said, "You know, that
was also the role that made Cesar Romero a star when Carmanate left."
Well, you know, I had just read the cast list and he was completely right.
And then he proceeded to slowly recall the entire thing and all the fine
points of that story. Just right after I had kind of thought that he was
just trying to cut off the conversation.

So, you know,
it was really disarming because he really had seen all this stuff! [Laughter]
He had really done it all and had really been there. And you couldn't
underestimate that. I learned you really had to be careful of dismissing
anything he said. I know that there all the stories about him kind of
exaggerating stories. I would imagine he probably did exaggerate some
stories. But he had experienced an awful lot and had interesting insights
on it all.

PT: Were
you in touch with him right up until his death?

JS: Well, I
was there the night at the Griffin show. (5) I met Barbara Leaming that
night and was supposed to go to dinner with him afterwards and begged
off. One of the reasons I begged off is because I was shooting a television
show at the time and I had to be on a set down in Marina Del Ray early
in the morning. So he went off to dinner with Barbara Leaming. And I was
on the set all day and when I got back to my apartment, 4 o'clock or 5
o'clock, there were all sorts of messages on the machine.

He was amazing that night and I helped put together that card trick that
he did that night.

PT: I haven't
seen too many of the Merv Griffin appearances, but that's one I have seen
and it's pretty great.

JS: You know,
I have to tell you, I don't know why he did those. [Laughs] Because having
been there two or three times--and, in fact, that night I had to go and
have Merv Griffin shuffle the deck. That was part of what Orson wanted--he
wanted someone to shuffle ahead of time. And I took the deck into Merv
Griffin to shuffle to give it to him. And, you know, none of those people
were interested in him doing that stuff. I mean, I'm involved in magic
but, the people on the show didn't care. And I couldn't quite understand
why he felt a need always to do the magic.

Here's what I think. I think he didn't have anything to promote. And he
was really self-conscious about that. Everyone else is on those shows
saying, My new movie, My new book, and Orson didn't ever get a chance
to do that. And so he was there because he had an amazing new illusion
to show you. And that was ostensibly kind of his reason for being there.
Now of course, you know, he didn't need to do that and of course once
he started talking on the panel, that's all anyone really cared about.

PT: That's
really interesting. I think you might actually be right. I hadn't thought
about that before. How would you rate Welles as a magician?

JS: Well, it's a hard thing to answer. First of all, in terms of presenting
magic, he was 10 out of 10. Because he was so magnetic and he could very
easily weave a spellbinding story and make it believable. And he had a
really good sense of that. Not only that voice and the manner, but also
just kind of as a scriptwriter. He just had instantly the way to zero
in on those things. I think a really good example of that--just since
you saw it--was that thing he's doing with that thread trick, where he
ties it up to the Indian rope trick--which is completely untrue. But it's
so believable and it's so charming and he instantly takes what is maybe
one of the tiniest tricks in magic and he introduces it by making it sound
legendary and fantastic. And he tells you, "This is the real secret."
And so as a presenter, he was great.

Technically, you had to be really careful not to underestimate him. He was self-conscious about performing sleight of hand that he used to be able to do. I remember, it's funny, he always liked handling bridge-sized cards, narrow cards, which looked small for him, I thought. But he always liked handling
bridge cards. I remember once having a conversation with him talking about
how he used to do a one-hand top palm really well, which is a move--I
gotta tell you, for someone not doing magic very often--isn't an easy
move. It's a real knack. And then he picked up the cards and went bang-bang-bang
and did a one-hand top palm and I saw and he really did do it. He pointed
out to me how his hands now shake a little and because of that sometimes
it doesn't fall exactly right. But there's no question he had real skills
technically.

I think he
has a reputation among magicians of having done some incredibly complicated,
overly complicated tricks on those guest appearances. My observation was
that he tended to over think magic and when he had doubts about it and
he would complicate it in an effort to make it more interesting. And so
he would add another layer to the presentation and then he would add another
layer to the presentation. And there were a couple of Tonight Show
appearances and things where things went wrong. The presentations
had been so complicated that it was building up to a miracle and, of course,
there was no way that it could pay off. I think that's the criticism of
him, doing those complicated presentations. My observation is that if
he spent too much time... if he spent two full weeks on something planning
it, it got too complicated because he would second-guess it. But if you
said to him, "I think that's too much," he'd go, "Okay,
fine." And I think people seldom said that to him. No one ever said,
"I don't think you need to do that, Orson."Because, you know,
if Orson Welles was saying, "This is what we're going to do,"
they went, "Okay, fine."

It's interesting, Maurice Zolotow wrote a piece in Reader's Digest
just after he died, which is a really great piece about Orson but he talks
about forty years earlier when Orson was trying to learn the trick where
he would cut to all four aces. And Zolotow, in this kind of wonderful
writer's fashion, ends up by saying, "Finally, at the end of his
life, he learned the secret to that
and that's what I saw on Merv Griffin that night." Well, that isn't
what he saw. [Laughter] But it is kind of a sweet, great way of tying
it all up.

PT: What links would you make between Welles the magician and Welles
the filmmaker? Because he returned to magic all throughout his life, even
after entering film...

JS: Well, I remember having conversations with him, and as he described
situations he'd experienced and his solutions, I remember thinking, "This
is exactly how a really clever magician thinks." Instead of being
intimidated that I was with this fantastic, legendary filmmaker who was
an expert in a world I knew nothing about, I realized that he was an expert
in a world I knew a lot about. He had a really clever sense of kind of
problem-solving. Everything was about creating one specific effect and
everything is arranged towards that, both in the audience's mind and mechanically.
And I think maybe in examples like in Othello (1952) where he's
got doubles everywhere...

PT: I was
just going to mention that as an example of this...

JS: Some of
that goes too far. I don't if his ability to solve problems was a problem,
because he really did know what he could get away with. And sometimes
that works as a detriment. Almost being too clever like that. Because
you know every trick, and you know what the audience will let you get
away with, you sometimes are tying yourself up in knots.

PT: An observation
I've made about The Dreamers footage--since I'm familiar with it--is
how he was able to achieve such expressive effects with very, very little
in the way of production resources. The film was to be a period piece
set in the 19th century, but the material he shot was filmed essentially
in his living room and backyard in Hollywood. And I think things like
that make it easy for one to form some tenuous connections... the whole
idea of the director as an illusionist.

JS: I remember
him talking about, incredibly, simple things like using carpets for camera
moves, dragging carpets. But you realize that he was really in those positions
to need that at the last minute. And he wasn't intimidated by any of that.
He wasn't intimidated at kind of changing directions and doing something
slightly different.

I think he
did approach a lot of things kind of as a magic show, that he looked at
creating the most effect from anything--what it was all about was creating
an individual effect in someone's mind and that you want to leave them
with an impression. You know, in a magic show, there aren't any base hits.
You either hit a home run or nothing happens. So every bit of psychology
and every bit of that has to be organized like that.

I remember
selfishly thinking when he died--I think I was 27--that I might have met
the most interesting person of my life at 27. He was a remarkable person.

ENDNOTES:

(1) The
Cradle Will Rock was a screenplay written by Welles in 1984. Welles
was originally approached to direct a film detailing his efforts to stage
the Marc Blitzstein play of the same title in the 1930s. Though initially
reluctant to direct, he eventually ended up discarding the Ring Lardner
authored screenplay and rewriting it himself with the intent of directing.

(2) The Dreamers was perhaps the most personal of Welles' late
projects. Taken from two stories by his favorite author, Isak Dinesen,
Welles shot around 25 minutes of material for the film between 1980 and
1982 in his Hollywood home and with his own money.

(3) This material
is not included in the Munich Filmmuseum's aforementioned assembly of
material intended for The Magic Show.

(4) Around the time Welles was trying to get The Cradle Will Rock
made, Steven Spielberg won, at auction, the Rosebud sled from Citizen
Kane. But, according to various accounts, when Welles had dinner with
Spielberg and his then-wife Amy Irving (who was to star in The Cradle
Will Rock), Spielberg made no overtures to assist Welles with making
the clearly ailing production happen.

(5) Welles was on The Merv Griffin Show, doing magic and appearing
with his biographer Barbara Leaming, the night of October 9, 1985. Early
the next morning, he died; in his typewriter were, as Steinmeyer comments,
notes for material he planned to shoot the following day at UCLA for The
Magic Show.